Digital Pioneer Shortlisted for National Award
19th April 2007
Pioneering digital author Kate Pullinger has been shortlisted for a national innovation award for her work taking literature into a new interactive realm.
Kate Pullinger, Reader in Creative Writing and New Media at De Montfort University Leicester, is among 50 women shortlisted for the annual British Female Innovators and Inventors Award (BFIIN).
The BFIIN Awards are run by Global Women Inventors & Innovators Network (GWIN) which aims to increase the number of innovative women embracing enterprise.
The BFIIN conference will take place next week (Tuesday 24 April) at the Department of Trade & Industry in London and the winner will be announced at an awards ceremony at The Café Royal, London, on Tuesday evening.
Kate has pioneered written works of fiction on the internet, and is one of the UK's only established writers to make inroads into digital fiction with projects ranging from the worlds first-ever wiki-novel project with Penguin UK and De Montfort University's Institute of Creative Technologies, to the first casual online game for women.
The successful 'A Million Penguins' wiki-novel project (www.amillionpenguins.com) was a unique experiment in collaborative digital writing, ultimately written by over 2000 authors, viewed by hundreds of thousands of others, and debated by the international media and scores of weblogs around the world.
Another example of her work is the award-winning online multimedia novel, Inanimate Alice, co-created with Chris Joseph, which tells its story through photography, illustrations, video, music, animation and narrative text (see www.inanimatealice.com).
Kate has found new ways to maximise the potential for collaboration with distributed and virtual social networks for entertainment and education. Such networks encompass an enormously diverse population, in the UK and worldwide, and especially the under-catered for audiences of girls and women which have been a focus with work such as the UK's first online casual game aimed at women, 'Venus Redemption', for the games developer nDreams (see www.storygamer.com).
Further examples can be seen in the development, with Professor Sue Thomas at De Montfort University, of the UK's first Masters degree programme in creative and digital writing, where Kate is using her expertise to enthuse students.
Kate said: "It's very exciting to be shortlisted for this award because it brings recognition to the cutting edge of creativity in new media that we're constantly exploring"
ENDS
Notes for Editors
For further information or to arrange an interview with Kate Pullinger please contact De Montfort University Press Office on 0116 2577021
For further information or to be kept informed about IOCT activities, please contact:The Director, Institute of Creative Technologies,
De Montfort University, The Gateway, Leicester, LE1 9BH
Tel: (+44) 0116 250 6146
Email: eedmonds [at] dmu.ac.uk
www.ioct.dmu.ac.uk